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Issues reading a string with weird characters in SQL Server 2008 and previous versions

Here is my issue today: we load some info from text files into a SQL Server table. The thing is that for a field I realized that the string value is a little bit weird.

When I query the table with a SQL Server client 2008 or previous, I got this result set:

enter image description here

Even if I try to run a query like this one below, the resultset is empty:

select REPLACE(LTRIM(RTRIM(cust_po)), '  ', ' ') 
from dbo.test_char
where cust_po like '%076929%'

The weird thing is: with SQL Server 2016, just opening the table looks normal, although the query doesn’t return any results either:

enter image description here

Now, following a couple of instruction from @SolomonRutzky I have performed the query below to get a result in varbinary

enter image description here

the new result is : 0x300037003600390032003900BC05BC05BC05BC05BC05BC05BC05BC05BC05

how could get that as a varchar without the weird chars or space or wherever that is?

Issues reading a string with weird characters in SQL Server 2008 and previous versions